Palace and museum tickets

What each place costs

All five royal sites are run by the Royal Palaces and Tombs Centre (궁능유적본부), and ordinary admission tickets are available at the gate. Timed sessions and special events have separate arrangements.

The integrated ticket (통합관람권) is ₩6,000 for one visit to each of the four palaces and Jongmyo within six months — compare it with the separate tickets you need, and it does not include Huwon. A Huwon ticket does not admit you to the palace it sits behind: you buy both.

Check eligibility for free ordinary admission

• Anyone wearing hanbok, Korean or foreign, traditional or modern, at all five sites — but it must be a proper top and a proper bottom. A jeogori with jeans, hanbok trousers with a T-shirt, a coat with nothing qualifying under it, or a one-piece with no separate jeogori all fail. Rental shops dress you to the standard — “Renting hanbok (한복), Korean traditional dress”.
• Foreign visitors aged 18 or under, or 65 or over, qualify for free ordinary admission. Bring your passport to show your age.
• Ordinary admission is free on Culture Day, the last Wednesday of the month. Check the Culture Day programme for details. Huwon and special events have separate rules.

Hours, and the day each one shuts

The usual closing days differ by site, which can help you arrange visits on different days — “It is Monday, or it is raining. What is open, and free?”.

Hours are published by the operator. A closing day that falls on a public holiday moves to the day after.

Reserve a timed session for Huwon

Huwon is the garden behind Changdeokgung Palace and has limited timed-entry places. You cannot wander it; you enter on a guided session, and each session is capped at 100 people — 50 sold online, 50 at the gate.

• The 50 online seats go on sale at 10:00 Korean time six days before your visit date, first come first served, and close the night before; up to 10 tickets per person, one booking per date. Booking runs through Uforus (유포러스), which has an English option and signs you up with a phone number rather than the Korean identity check — “Why do Korean booking apps reject me?”. Whether its checkout takes a foreign card is not something it states; the gate is the fallback.
• The 50 gate seats go on sale at 09:00 on the day, for every session. On autumn-foliage weekends and in spring, arrive before sales open if you are relying on the limited same-day allocation.
• Arrive 20 minutes before your session. The walk from the palace entrance to the garden gate takes 15 minutes or more, and late arrivals may lose their place and cannot assume they will be moved to another session.
• On the English, Japanese and Chinese sessions, Korean nationals may join only as companions of a foreign visitor, two at most — which keeps those sessions from filling with domestic demand.

Jongmyo, which is also timed

On Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays Jongmyo is guided-tour only — you enter at a set time and walk the shrine with a guide for about an hour, in Korean, English, Japanese or Chinese. On Saturdays, Sundays, public holidays and Culture Day it is free-roaming, 09:00–18:00. Closed Tuesdays. Check whether your visit falls on a guided-entry day or a day when you can explore independently.

Check museum admission and session bookings separately

The National Museum of Korea (국립중앙박물관) in Yongsan charges nothing for its permanent galleries or its children's museum. Paid special exhibitions are ticketed at the counter in front of Special Exhibition Hall 1 until 30 minutes before closing; online sales run through Ticketlink and Naver (Korea's dominant search portal), both Korean-language, and the counter avoids both. Hours are 09:30–17:30 (last entry 17:00), extended to 21:00 on Wednesdays and Saturdays; closed 1 January, Seollal (Korean Lunar New Year, the biggest family holiday of the year) and Chuseok (the Korean autumn harvest holiday, the year's other big family break), and the exhibition halls on the first Monday of June, September and December. The children's museum books by timed session. Since June 2024 there is security screening at the door and backpacks go into the ground-floor lockers.

What to buy in advance

Check the operator’s current admission and booking pages before travelling. If the English page lacks a detail, the Korean page and browser translation may help you find it.